Validation of manufacturing processes often requires destructive inspection of a part of interest. In this validation, typically a representative part will be manufactured and several physical cuts will be made throughout the part. A number of cuts can be on the order of thousands depending on a size of the part. The cuts are recorded in a form of high resolution optical images. These images, called photomicrographs, are typically then viewed by a human and conclusions on quality of the part are made based on human measurement of various features, such as wrinkles or radii in the images.
Manual measurements of various features in the images have several drawbacks including training employees on how to make the measurements, as well as variability in measurement consistency and quality by different people or the same person. Furthermore, manually assessing the images to determine conformance of surface contours of a part to a specification is both subjective and labor intensive.
What is needed is a process for analyzing the photomicrographs that can reduce an amount of time associated with human interpretation of the photomicrographs, and also remove the variability in the measurements that can arise with human interpretation.